When Cookie Burkhalter relocated from Colorado to Wilmington,
Delaware three years ago, she thought finding a new job would be
easy. With first-rate qualifications and more than twenty years
of professional experience at Fortune 500 companies, she figured
she would land a new position quickly by surfing a few Internet
job boards and sending out her résumé.
But Burkhalter, an IT project manager, quickly discovered that
it wasn't going to be so easy. After months of applying for open
positions, "I never got a single interview from a posting on the
Net," she declared. "Applying for all those jobs was a complete
waste of my time."
When things began to turn around for Burkhalter was when she
realized that the missing element in her job search was the
human factor. "Even though I grew up in Delaware, I had been
living out of state for a long time," she recalled. "I had
almost no local contacts, so I was relying on postings and ads
to find out about available jobs. But by the time I saw the ad,
so had thousands of other people, and there was always one of
them who was just a little more qualified than me."
So Burkhalter set about rebuilding her personal network. She
joined two women's groups made up of others who shared some of
her personal interests and hobbies, and began to meet new
people. When she let her new friends know about her job search,
all of a sudden, she began to hear about jobs before they were
advertised, and interviews started to materialize. When she
finally did land a new job, it was the direct result of a
referral from a friend.
You may not recognize what Burkhalter did as networking, but
that's exactly what it was. Many women think of networking as
circulating around a room exchanging business cards. But a
broader view of networking is creating a pool of contacts from
which you can draw leads, referrals, ideas, and information for
your job search. You can network without ever attending an
official networking event.
Texas resident Maria Elena Duron found an executive job as a
result of working as a community volunteer. "I was volunteering
at the Midlands MexTex Fiesta, and I found myself flipping
burgers side-by-side with a board member of the Austin Juvenile
Diabetes Research Foundation," Duron remembers. "He asked me if
I had ever been involved in fundraising, and when I said I had,
he asked for my résumé. He forwarded it to the Foundation with
his personal recommendation, and three weeks later I was hired
as Executive Director for the West Texas Region."
Your career network can and should contain current and former
co-workers, alumni from your school, a wide range of people in
your industry, and personal friends. Making time for lunch or
coffee with these people can be much more productive for your
job search than reading the want ads or surfing the web. In
fact, surveys consistently show that 80-85% of job-seekers find
work as the result of a referral from a friend or colleague, and
only 2-4% land jobs from Internet job boards.
If you have been out of touch for a while with people you
already know, don't let that stop you from re-establishing
contact when you start your job search. Everyone you speak to
will have had to look for work at some point in their career,
and most of them will be sympathetic and helpful.
To spread your net even wider, you may need to start making the
acquaintance of new people also. Every time you talk to a friend
or colleague about your job search, ask for suggestions of other
you might speak to, and follow up on their referrals.
Attending organized events may also play a role in your job
search, since this can be an easy way to expand your network
quickly. Here are some popular choices for networking events:
- Chamber of Commerce mixers
- Service clubs such as Rotary and Kiwanis
- Trade and professional association meetings in your industry
- Lectures, workshops, conferences, and fundraisers hosted by
educational institutions, community organizations, and affinity
groups
- Social, cultural, and sporting events that include receptions
or other mix-and-mingle time
- Private gatherings organized for the purpose of meeting new
people and schmoozing
- Job clubs
You will have more success at this kind of networking if you go
back to the same groups over and over than if you keep going to
new groups all the time. Find two or three that seem to have the
right mix of people, and keep going back.
If you don't follow up with the people you meet, though, you are
wasting your time in meeting them. You may think that once you
have told someone what type of job you are looking for, if they
hear of something, they will call you. The truth is that if they
have met you only once, they probably don't even remember you,
and it's even less likely that they will remember where they put
your number.
After meeting someone new, send them a "nice-to-meet-you" note
and invite them to attend another event with you or make a date
for lunch or coffee. Find out what the two of you have in
common, and see if there is an activity you could share.
Building relationships likes this takes time and effort, but
relationships are the core of networking. The people in your
network should be people you truly enjoy interacting with,
because if you're doing it right, you'll be spending a lot of
time with them.
Says Duron, "Don't limit yourself to just networking in your
industry; everyone is interconnected. Getting to know a day care
director makes sense even if you don't want a job in day care,
because she knows so many people. Waiters and hairdressers are
often the first to hear about coming changes that lead to open
positions. As long as you have your antennae out and listen, you
can connect with anyone."
Don't expect networking to be a quick fix for your job search.
It can take time for your relationship-building efforts to pay
off. You need to put in the effort to get to know people, and
trust that you will see results from it. But the best time to
begin building your network is while you are still employed.
|
